Friday, March 2, 2012

A long, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, analysis of current trends in television narrative centering on the move away from series episodes toward installments of longer works.

This change, which has been sneaking up on us for a long time now, suddenly seems more important than anything else that's been going on in movies and television this decade. Maybe we should start being more analytical about it....

Some quotes I liked:

It’s easy to blur the line between “episode” and “installment” if you’re blowing through an entire season of Breaking Bad over a single weekend. When doing this,thinking about how a certain episode works on its own becomes less relevant. Simply getting through the virtual stack of content becomes paramount, with the next episode literally moments away from appearing on your screen. Plowing through a single season in two or three sittings may feel thrilling, but it’s also shifted the importance of a single episode in terms of the overall experience.....

A television show is a living, breathing entity that represents a synergy of creative, cultural, and social forces that simply can’t be predicted five weeks out, never mind five years out. It’s not a book that can be rewritten before anyone can read it, or a film that can be reshot/re-edited before it screens in theaters. The cat’s out of the bag, for better or worse. Laying in groundwork for a massive payoff down the line is a terrible risk, one that comes with so little control as to be almost laughable.

What can be controlled is a reaffirmation of the structural and narrative importance of a single episode. You don’t even have to construct a theoretical example of how to balance the needs of an episode with the needs of a season or series. FX’s Justified offers a master class in how to achieve both. Graham Yost and his writing staff have found the sweet spot where an episode has a shape unto itself while informing the larger 13-episode season and the ever-growing series, while at the same time focusing on world-building, something television is fantastic at doing. With a theoretically unlimited amount of episodes to fill, it’s smart to look at the environments in which shows operate and look under rocks and behind corners to see what might exist. Harlan feels three-dimensional, and though it’s self-contained, it also feels limitless in terms of story potential.

And, of course, he criticises "Luck" for completely ignoring what he sees as the need for some sort of sub-resolution in each episode: pointing out, as has another friend of mine, that the series doesn't really fall into place until half-way through the fourth episode.

You may be more inclined toward the "Ulysses' Gaze" school of filmmaking than you think. Certainly, a preference for the episodic over the installment is an aestically conservative one.

Funny that he doesn't mention either "X-Files" or "Lost," which I'd be willing to bet have had more influence on mainstream TV than anything on HBO.

"Justified" is as different from those shows as it could possibly be: No high concept, just characters and a fertile situation. It's as much a family drama as a cop show. Crucially, also, it is not a mystery series. It follows the EL method of spending as much time with the crooks, who are known from the outset, as with the cops. A scene that's just Raylen and his ex-wife or Raylen and his dad isn't going to frustrate people who are desperate to find out what happens next.

Finally the episode vs. installment beef seems too inside TV, to me. The notion of a "terrible risk" is all about what it's safe to bet your budget on. If viewers really were turned off by the installment plan, would it have caught on in the first place? And what about shows that actually are based on novels, such as GoTs? "Improvisations" in that context are likely to enrage fans of the books.

The question of whether it's best to have the whole story planned out or to improvise from episode to episode reminds me of another inside distinction: Writers who say they work from an outline vs. those (like Elmore) who say they come up with a character and an initial situation and then dive in. Both approaches have produced terrific novels, and writers would be well-advised to stick to the method that works best for them -- and to put their fingers in their ears when someone tries to tell them they're doing it wrong.

He praises Justified and Breaking Bad both for the quality you amplify. I just watched the (I imagine) famous episode of Breaking Bad where the two leads chase after a fly for an episode, to little effect, except to talk.

I think you're a bit too dismissive of commercial pressures for television: There are underground movies and viral videos, but no underground hour-long television series. TV is essentially grounded in funding, distribution, and audience reaction. Setting out to do a narrative that takes five seasons (if it's not based on a novel) IS a terrible risk, both for the creators and their backers.

This writer is being a little slippery about which of those issues he's addressing. He seems to be arguing from the high ground of aesthetics and quality when he's really talking about the biz. These are arguments that could (and I bet will) be used by network suits trying to shut down something "risky."

Misunderstood again. I did not, of course, say what you thought I said.

I maintain that, since about ten million people think that The Wire is the greatest television series of all time, any idiot would have greenlit it. The irreplacable genius of the system we now have is that a way exists to pay for it and to gather the talent to write it.

Better enjoy it while you can -- the cool kids who unplug and get their stuff from Pirate Bay are slowly killing the golden goose.

Well, maybe.... I date my personal awakening to the joys of extended narrative television (setting aside BBC adaptations of novels and Douglas Adams's "Key to Time" season of Doctor Who) to the Mel Proffit story in Wiseguy, which predated Twin Peaks by a couple of years -- and also introduced Kevin Spacey to a waiting world.. (You can see baby Kevin here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP_wNGPdu5c)

There was also a series shortly after that called "Crime Story," starring guess who:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090410/

And Bochco's "Murder One:"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112086/

It hit me a couple of days ago that a lot of this is really re-inventing the wheel, critically speaking, applying principles that are truisms in the context novels, plays, operas, but are striking here because long-form TV -- TV that isn't more like a book of short stories -- is relatively new. Of course the most elegantly structured long works have parts and chapters that are also elegantly shaped internally, while contributing to the development of the whole. It was ever thus.

Back when I was still an earnest Euro-centrist (as ever, cherchez la femme) I glommed onto a notion of Goethe's, applying to aesthetics an insight from biology: that the parts create the whole while also being created by the whole and by each other. I challenge you to contemplate that idea for more than 30 seconds without getting dizzy.